There Is a God

godthere is a How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese contents Preface v introduction 1 part i: my denial of the divine 7 1. The Creation of an Atheist 9 2. Where the Evidence Leads 31 3. Atheism Calmly Considered 65 part ii: my discovery of the divine 83 4. A Pilgrimage of Reason 85 5. Who Wrote the Laws of Nature? 95 6. Did the Universe Know We Were Coming? 113 7. How Did Life Go Live? 123 8. Did Something Come from Nothing? 133 9. Finding Space for God 147 10. Open to Omnipotence 155 iii iv contents Appendices 159 Appendix A The “New Atheism”: A Critical Appraisal of Dawkins, Dennett, Wolpert, Harris, and Stenger Roy Abraham Varghese 161 Appendix B The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N.T. Wright 185 Notes 215 About the Author Praise Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher preface “ amous Atheist Now Believes in God: One of World’s FLeading Atheists Now Believes in God, More or Less, Based on Scientific Evidence.” This was the head- line of a December 9, 2004, Associated Press story that went on to say: “A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.” Almost immediately, the announcement became a media event touching off reports and commentaries around the globe on radio and TV, in newspapers and on Internet sites. The story gained such momentum that AP put out two subsequent releases relating to the original announcement. The subject of the story and of much subsequent speculation was Profes- sor Antony Flew, author of over thirty professional philosophical works that helped set the agenda for atheism for half a century. In fact, his “Theology and Falsifi cation,” a paper first presented at a 1950 meeting of the Oxford Uni- versity Socratic Club chaired by C. S. Lewis, became the v vi preface most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last century. Now, for the first time, he gives an account of the arguments and evidence that led him to change his mind. This book, in a sense, represents the rest of the story. I played a small part in the AP story because I had helped organize the symposium and resulting video in which Tony Flew announced what he later humorously referred to as his “conversion.” In fact, from 1985, I had helped organize several conferences at which he had made the case for atheism. So this work is personally the culmi- nation of a journey begun two decades ago. Curiously, the response to the AP story from Flew’s fel- low atheists verged on hysteria. One atheist Web site tasked a correspondent with giving monthly updates on Flew’s falling away from the true faith. Inane insults and juvenile caricatures were common in the freethinking blogosphere. The same people who complained about the Inquisition and witches being burned at the stake were now enjoying a little heresy hunting of their own. The advocates of toler- ance were not themselves very tolerant. And, apparently, religious zealots don’t have a monopoly on dogmatism, incivility, fanaticism, and paranoia. But raging mobs cannot rewrite history. And Flew’s position in the history of atheism transcends anything that today’s atheists have on offer. reface vii FLEW’S SIGNIFICANCE IN THE HISTORY OF ATHEISM It is not too much to say that within the last hundred years, no mainstream philosopher has developed the kind of systematic, comprehensive, original, and infl uential exposi- tion of atheism that is to be found in Antony Flew’s fi fty years of antitheological writings. Prior to Flew, the major apologias for atheism were those of Enlightenment think- ers like David Hume and the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche. But what about Bertrand Russell (who maintained rather implausibly that he was technically an agnostic, although he was an atheist in practice), Sir Alfred Ayer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger, all of whom were twentieth-century atheists well before Flew began writing? In Russell’s case, it is quite obvious that he did not produce anything beyond a few polemical pam- phlets on his skeptical views and his disdain for organized religion. His Religion and Science and Why I Am Not a Christian were simply anthologies of articles—he produced no systematic philosophy of religion. At best, he drew atten- tion to the problem of evil and sought to refute traditional arguments for God’s existence without generating any new arguments of his own. Ayer, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger viii preface have this in common: their focus was on generating a spe- cifi c way of engaging in philosophical discussion, an after- effect of which was the denial of God. They had their own systems of thought of which atheism was a by-product. You had to buy into their systems to buy into their atheism. The same might be said of later nihilists like Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. Of course, there were major philosophers of Flew’s gen- eration who were atheists; W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle are obvious instances. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs. Why so? In many instances, professional philosophers in those days were disinclined to dirty their delicate hands by indulging in such popular, even vulgar, discussions. In other cases, the motive was prudence. Certainly, in later years, there were atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence. These range from Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, and Paul Kurtz to J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, and Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did. Where does the originality of Flew’s atheism lie? In “The- ology and Falsifi cation,” God and Philosophy, and The Pre- sumption of Atheism, he developed novel arguments against theism that, in some respects, laid out a road map for subse- reface ix quent philosophy of religion. In “Theology and Falsifi cation” he raised the question of how religious statements can make meaningful claims (his much-quoted expression “death by a thousand qualifi cations” captures this point memorably); in God and Philosophy he argued that no discussion on God’s existence can begin until the coherence of the concept of an omnipresent, omniscient spirit had been established; in The Presumption of Atheism he contended that the burden of proof rests with theism and that atheism should be the default position. Along the way, he of course analyzed the traditional arguments for God’s existence. But it was his rein- vention of the frames of reference that changed the whole nature of the discussion. In the context of all of the above, Flew’s recent rejec- tion of atheism was clearly a historic event. But it is little known that, even in his atheist days, Flew had, in a sense, opened the door to a new and revitalized theism. FLEW, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, AND THE REBIRTH OF RATIONAL THEISM Here’s the paradox. By defending the legitimacy of discuss- ing theological claims and challenging philosophers of religion to elucidate their assertions, Flew facilitated the rebirth of rational theism in analytic philosophy after the dark days x preface of logical positivism. A little background information will be of value here. Logical positivism, as some might remember, was the philosophy introduced by a European group called the Vienna Circle in the early 1920s and popularized by A. J. Ayer in the English-speaking world with his 1936 work Lan- guage, Truth and Logic. According to the logical positivists, the only meaningful statements were those capable of being verified through sense experience or true simply by virtue of their form and the meaning of the words used. Thus a statement was meaningful if its truth or falsehood could be verifi ed by empirical observation (e.g., scientifi c study). The statements of logic and pure mathematics were tautol- ogies; that is, they were true by definition and were simply ways of using symbols that did not express any truth about the world. There was nothing else that could be known or coherently discussed. At the heart of logical positivism was the verification principle, the claim that the meaning of a proposition consists in its verification. The result was that the only meaningful statements were those used in science, logic, or mathematics. Statements in metaphysics, religion, aesthetics, and ethics were literally meaningless, because they could not be verified by empirical methods. They were neither valid nor invalid. Ayer said that it was just as absurd to be an atheist as to be a theist, since the statement “God exists” simply has no meaning. preface xi Today many introductory works of philosophy associ- ate Flew’s approach in “Theology and Falsifi cation” with Ayer’s kind of logical positivist assault on religion, since both question the meaningfulness of religious statements. The problem with this picture is that it does not in any way reflect Flew’s own understanding of the matter then or now. In fact, far from buttressing the positivist view of religion, Flew considered his paper as a final nail in the coffi n of that particular way of doing philosophy. In a 1990 presentation I organized on the fortieth anni- versary of the publication of “Theology and Falsifi cation,” Flew stated: As an undergraduate I had become increasingly frustrated and exasperated by philosophical debates which seemed always to revert to, and never to move forward from, the logical positivism most brilliantly expounded in .

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